


(nothing but the) dead and dying

by stillscape



Series: tumblr prompts collection [3]
Category: Riverdale (TV 2017)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, F/M, Future Fic, the author does not have an accurate sense of when she is and isn't writing angst
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-05
Updated: 2018-01-05
Packaged: 2019-02-28 12:39:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13271628
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/stillscape/pseuds/stillscape
Summary: After only a few months, he knows the sequence of events like the back of his hand: she’ll text from thirty minutes out, then fifteen, at which point he’ll bundle in an ever-increasing number of layers and head downstairs. She’ll text again at five minutes out, which he knows means she’s actually already parked and is approaching the front door of his building.It prickles, sometimes, this obsessive need Betty has to check on him.Or: four years later, Jughead Jones makes it out of Riverdale.





	(nothing but the) dead and dying

**Author's Note:**

  * For [flwrpotts](https://archiveofourown.org/users/flwrpotts/gifts).



> Dear flwrpotts, I am so sorry your original exchange author has yet to pull through for you! I have taken the liberty of filling your prompt myself (or rather, two prompts, since you asked for both "Bughead angst" and "Bughead future fic." I hope this works for you! Thanks go to heartunsettledsoul for giving me a few pointers about direction, and to village_skeptic, with whom I have had more detailed conversations about Jughead x college than one might expect, and finally to whatever anonymous person first prompted "It's three in the morning" to my tumblr asks, which proved to be the spark here.
> 
> I never write to music, but this fic has a playlist of precisely one song, Paul Simon's ["My Little Town."](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X1_CNl6w2Tk#action=share)

It’s later than normal when his phone buzzes for the first time. _I’m half an hour away_ , reads the text. Jughead sighs and rolls over in his bed. He wasn’t asleep—has never been asleep—but one of these days, he might be. Tonight is not that night, however, so he swaps his pajama pants for jeans, shoves his boots on, and waits. 

After only a few months, he knows the sequence of events like the back of his hand: she’ll text from thirty minutes out, then fifteen, at which point he’ll bundle in an ever-increasing number of layers and head downstairs. She’ll text again at five minutes out, which he knows means she’s actually already parked and is approaching the front door of his building. 

It prickles, sometimes, this obsessive need Betty has to check on him. 

On this particular occasion, she arrives at his apartment building less than two minutes after her five-minute text—pink fluffy earmuffs on, hands in the pockets of her warmest coat, shoulders hunched against the wind. 

“Hi,” she says. 

“It’s three in the morning.” 

“I know.” 

“It’s freezing,” he adds, though this is currently an understatement; it’s well below freezing, and not scheduled to get warmer anytime soon. 

“I know that too.” 

Her lips are twisted in some sort of smile. The night is too dark for Jughead to properly match it up against any of the entries in his vast mental catalogue of Betty Cooper’s Smiles, the one he’s been curating since they were twelve years old, but he’s got a pretty good idea which one it’s going to be: the anxious one she wears when she’s trying to convince him she isn’t worried. Why she’s worried about him now—one week into the new year, classes not even started yet—is slightly beyond his ken. 

They start on their usual route: north, towards Lake Ontario, despite the fact that the lakefront is even more frigid. He’s one of the few freshmen who doesn’t live on campus, and though dorm life might have been cheaper, when the time had finally come, Jughead had found himself completely unable to face the idea of sharing a room with some _kid_ (some kid who would have been all of one year younger than him), of sharing a building with _hundreds_ of kids. 

(Luckily, rent in Oswego is pretty manageable.) 

“So Syracuse wasn’t cold enough for you?” 

“I couldn’t sleep,” she says. It’s the reason she always gives him. He’s not sure it’s a very good one. No one should drive to Oswego in the middle of the night.

  
  
  
  


Betty got out. Betty left right on schedule, hightailed her way to Syracuse with a near-full scholarship in hand. He remembers her relief when she’d received the email, how he could see her shaking from clear on the other side of the student lounge. 

They were broken up then. It had been sticking for a few weeks, but twenty seconds and three deep breaths after she’d gotten the email, she was looking back over her shoulder at him, eyebrows knitted in hope. He sauntered over and clapped a congratulatory hand on her shoulder, intending for that to be their only physical contact of the day. 

Twenty minutes later they were making out in the _Blue and Gold_ office, his back pushed against the wall that had once held a murder board while Betty clutched his hip with a grip so tight he found two faint bruises in the shower the next morning. 

“Betty,” he said, and in the second between when she pushed herself away from him and when she turned her face, he saw her eyes fill with tears. 

She walked towards the door, head still high, and said only, “No, you’re right.” 

Her ponytail disappeared through the door with its usual emphatic swish.

  
  
  
  


They don’t talk as they make their way towards the lake. They never talk much on these occasions. A howling, swirling, maddeningly icy wind would make the attempt at conversation completely pointless tonight anyway. Jughead tugs his hat tighter over his ears. He wears a different hat now, when he wears one at all, a plain navy blue stocking cap with a plain rolled brim and no embellishments. It’s a hat worn for practical reasons, not aesthetic ones. 

Betty glances over at him, then quickly returns to staring at the path before her. 

“What?” 

“I miss your old hat,” she says, not for the first time. “That’s all.” 

“Yeah, well.” The words come out with a puffy, icy cloud. 

He’s learned the hard way that when you abruptly stop wearing an accessory you’ve worn for most of your life, people you barely know feel compelled to say the stupidest shit about it. _You almost look like a different person_ is the number one response, a phrase also uttered by people who do know him well: Archie and Veronica and Kevin and Toni and his father and, yeah, even by Betty. 

Betty was the only one who said the words without giving the impression that she thought the observation was a clever one; the only one who had sounded wistful, maybe even a little sad, as though the loss of the original Jughead was something to be mourned. Consequently, he hadn’t _minded_ when she said it. 

Betty was the only one who seemed to intuit that almost looking like a different person didn’t make him feel like a different person at all. 

Of course, she was also the one who had bought him the new hat in the first place.

  
  
  
  


The summer Jughead was seventeen, the summer between junior and senior year, F.P. was arrested again, this time on a minor public intoxication charge that, thanks to his priors, was nevertheless going to land him behind bars for a while.

This time, incredibly, Jughead’s mother showed up to take him to Toledo. 

His parents hadn’t seen each other in going on three years, but the knowing glance they exchanged over his head through the bars of the county jail’s holding cell clued Jughead in to the fact that they’d been talking more about him than he knew. 

(He hadn’t known they ever talked at all anymore, let alone about him.)

“This is bullshit,” Jughead muttered, after Gladys had gone back to the lobby. All of it was bullshit: the arrest, his mother’s sudden appearance, all of it. 

“Jug,” F.P. said. “Look at me.” 

Reluctantly, and with plans already forming in his head, Jughead did. 

“Go with your mother.” 

“Why?” he spat. “I don’t know her anymore. She’s been _gone_.”

“Jughead—”

“She never fucking wanted me in the first place!” 

F.P. sighed deeply and ran a hand through his unwashed hair. “Jughead. Go with her.” 

“No.” 

“ _Go with her_ ,” F.P. said for a third time, each word nearly a complete sentence. “It’s the best chance you’ve got.” 

“The best chance at what?” 

F.P. stared out at him from the holding cell. “Not turning into me,” he said, as though this was supposed to be obvious. “Jesus Christ. You think this—” here he started gesturing at himself with his left hand— “You think _this_ is what I want for you? You’re supposed to be the smart one in this family.” 

Whether consciously or not, the gesture ended with F.P.’s hand over his right shoulder—the shoulder that, like Jughead’s, bore a snake tattoo. 

All at once, and out of nowhere, Jughead felt as though he might throw up. He felt that way until about two weeks after his arrival in Ohio.

He slept a lot that summer. His mother did not nag him about it. 

“There’s something exhausting about being angry all the time,” she said one afternoon. Though she appeared to be speaking to a potted rhododendron in the kitchen window, Jughead nevertheless felt—possibly for the first time in his life—that they understood each other.

  
  
  
  


He didn’t go to Riverdale High’s senior prom. None of the Serpents did. He didn’t hang out with the Serpents that night, either; though he was nominally still in the gang, the summer in Toledo had changed things in a way he couldn’t articulate. Toni still crashed at the trailer sometimes, and Jughead still found himself at the Whyte Wyrm every so often, but while loyalty had once blazed through every one of his veins, what he now felt for the Serpents was more accurately described as a sort of trickling apathy. 

And so, on prom night, Jughead left his black leather jacket at home and headed to Pop’s with his laptop. He felt secure in the knowledge that he’d be safely alone, that the after-party would not make its way here, and that all he’d have to endure from Pop were sympathetic glances and unlimited coffee refills. 

Precisely three minutes after midnight, Betty pushed through the door. She was still in her dress—a sleeveless, floor-length, and perfectly tailored soft blue sheath that made her look like a goddamn sophisticated movie star but still, somehow, evoked the younger and more innocent Betty Cooper he’d fallen in love with. 

_God damn it_ , he thought. 

She didn’t even look around the diner. She just headed straight for his booth as though drawn there by a magnet, or fate, or whatever mysterious navigation systems birds used to find their way home in spring. She headed straight for his booth, and she slipped into the seat next to him, insinuating herself under his arm and tucking her head against him before he’d quite processed what was happening. 

“Where’s your date?” he asked, aware of how stupid the question was. 

“What date? I went stag.” 

“Oh,” he said, feeling even stupider. There was no way, he knew, that Betty had not been asked to prom. That meant she had chosen to go by herself, or more accurately as Archie and Veronica’s third wheel, and _that_ meant… 

It meant he should have asked her. 

Her hand snaked around his thigh, though not in a sexual way. It felt more like she just needed to hang on to something, and had decided the best option was him. 

Without asking for an order, Pop brought her a milkshake and fries, which she barely touched—the dress, apparently, was not designed for eating in—and for the longest time, they sat together, just breathing.

  
  
  
  


He’s thinking of Toledo now, for some reason, as he and Betty hit the midpoint of their usual loop and veer left, along the lake front. Maybe it’s just the presence of the lake that makes him think of that summer, of all the time he’d spent dripping with sweat as he walked along the shores of Lake Erie—although there’s a certain stupidity in that thought, seeing as it’s not even the same lake. 

It’s the same Betty, though, the same girl who’d been the only person in Riverdale to call him regularly while he was gone, the Betty who’d religiously visited his father in prison once a week and who’d been waiting at the bus stop when he returned. 

“Juggie…” she says, and they both stop walking. 

She turns to him, and he sees her eyes are red-rimmed and threatening to spill over with tears. “I know you think I keep driving up here because I’m worried about you, but that’s not it. I mean, I am, but I know you’re okay. I know you don’t need me to keep checking on you.” 

He braces himself, though for what, he couldn’t say. 

“It’s me,” she says, her voice soft but somehow still perfectly clear, even in all this wind. “ _I’m_ not okay.” 

Jughead’s next words come out without conscious thought. “Of course you’re—” 

“No,” she cuts in, sharp and decisive. “I’m not. Not always. Usually I am, but some nights, like tonight, I just…” 

The last word wobbles in the air between them. It transports Jughead back to Pop’s, a place that felt safer than home until one day it didn’t, and a time Betty’s face had lit up at the sight of him, a time she’d clung to him like she was drowning and he was some kind of life preserver, a time he’d been so preoccupied with the weight of what was about to happen to _him_ that he’d completely failed to notice what was already happening to _her_. And he’d sworn, afterwards, he’d promised himself _never again_ , but now it’s four years later and he’s _still_ fucking letting her down. 

“The nightmares never really went away.” 

She doesn’t have to tell him what she still has nightmares about. 

“And there are nights like tonight that I—I don’t even want to try sleeping, you know? Because I have that horrible feeling. And when that happens…” 

He tugs one of her hands from where it’s tucked in a pocket, gently uncurls her fingers—but she’s wearing gloves, of course. The hand is quickly pulled back as Betty shakes her head, blinks away tears. 

“I don’t do that anymore,” she says. “I come see you.”

“Betts,” he says, softly, his heart sinking as the truth strikes him: she’s replaced one self-harming impulse with another, worse one. 

“I’m cold.” Her pace quickens ever so slightly, the practiced careful tread of someone who grew up knowing the ground underfoot might always present you with unseen slippery ice. 

Jughead doesn’t ask if she wants to spend the night at his place, and she doesn’t ask if he minds. It is, after all, three-thirty in the morning.

  
  
  
  


Betty got out right on time. So did Archie, so did Veronica, so did Kevin and Moose and Reggie and Midge; one by one, the Northside kids left for college, while Jughead, predictably, went nowhere. By now he’d almost completely stopped going to the Whyte Wyrm, almost completely stopped wearing the leather jacket. Pop Tate gave him a job, because that was what Pop Tate did, and Jughead vowed not to fuck that up. Surely, he thought, even he couldn’t fail to clear that bar. 

It only took a month before the stasis threatened to suffocate him. 

It took two more weeks before he decided to do something about it. 

A slim blonde figure hurried across the quad in his direction, blonde ponytail swishing hypnotically, and Jughead wished he hadn’t come, wished he hadn’t punctured her ridiculously idyllic little bubble. They hadn’t even spoken since she’d left, just exchanged a few text messages, and what the hell was he _thinking_ —

But then he heard “Juggie?” and “Oh, my god,” and all at once Betty Cooper was in his arms and he realized for the millionth time that he would never, ever be able to make it stick. 

“Hey,” he said, as though this wasn’t awkward. 

He’d been expecting her to look good, to look _amazing_ , to have blossomed all over again as soon as she’d gotten out from under her mother’s thumb. And she did look amazing, in the way that Betty Cooper had spent her entire life looking amazing, but there was something dull and almost gray in her aura, something concerning that he couldn’t quite put his finger on. 

“Someone told me there was a mysterious cute guy on a motorcycle hanging around outside my dorm. I didn’t really believe her, but… hey, she was right.” Her eyes sparkled in the sunlight, and Jughead found he couldn’t resist smirking as he looked around the small parking lot. 

“Where?” 

This earned him an affectionate smack on the arm. “Come and see my room,” Betty said, and then, “I really hope my roommate’s not there.” 

Betty’s roommate was not there, and Jughead hadn’t been sitting nervously on the edge of Betty’s bed for more than twenty seconds before she sat next to him, pressing her thigh to his, and gave him a soft peck on the cheek. 

It took every last bit of Jughead’s resolve not to escalate the situation, and judging by the way Betty was now sitting on her hands, palms spread flat beneath her, he thought she might be feeling the same. 

“Why are you here?” she asked quietly, so he told her, watching closely as tears filled her eyes, hoping—nay, _praying_ —that she wouldn’t follow up with a line about being proud of him, because he was entirely sure he wouldn’t be able to handle that. 

Once it got close enough to dinnertime, Betty took him to the dining hall, then to a 24-hour coffee shop just off campus, where he drank too much coffee and listened to Betty brainstorm all the ways one might creatively represent _sort-of former gang member_ in an application essay, listened to her quickly and efficiently summarize the benefits of in-state tuition and the SUNY system and the extra benefits often afforded to first-generation college attendees. 

As the sun started peeking through the front windows, Jughead stood up, stretched, and said flatly “I still can’t afford it.” 

Betty sucked her lower lip between her teeth and surveyed their workspace. “We’ll figure it out,” she said. 

An hour later he was straddling the motorcycle and assuring her that he’d be fine to ride back to Riverdale on no sleep, that he’d pull over if he got too tired, that—

He stopped talking when she started kissing him goodbye—a real, proper, going-off-to-war kiss goodbye. Then she marched off to her dorm without another word or even a glance in his direction. 

Two weeks later, she emailed him an entirely feasible budget. He was on break at Pop’s when he got the email, paper hat beside him on the tabletop, and Pop—apparently having sensed a disturbance in the Force—was suddenly reading over Jughead’s shoulder. 

“That Betty Cooper,” was all he said, with a fond shake of the head. Jughead said nothing, but agreed wholeheartedly. 

The next week, he unexpectedly received a small raise, about which Pop claimed to know nothing.

  
  
  
  


They’re both shivering violently by the time they make it back to his tiny studio apartment. Jughead heads for the thermostat as soon as he’s taken his coat off, cranking up the heat as Betty rids herself of boots and outer layers. He doesn’t have any hot beverages except coffee, which he knows Betty won’t drink at this hour, so he puts on water for ramen noodles, fidgeting in the kitchenette for the five minutes they take to cook. The heat starts to kick in just as he’s wiping up the inevitable spilled drops of broth from his counter, and Betty emerges from the blanket cocoon she’d made on his bed. 

“Thanks,” she says, as she perches on one of his two breakfast bar stools. 

They eat in silence. Betty removes a toothbrush from her purse and goes to brush her teeth in silence. When Jughead returns from his own turn in the bathroom, she’s under the covers, wearing one of his t-shirts, an old one that he knows she pulled out of his laundry pile. 

“I have clean shirts,” he says, tilting his head at the dresser. He’s wearing one himself, now, preferring short sleeves over tank tops when Betty is around—as though that makes much of a difference, whether or not his tattoo is visible. 

Betty shakes her head _no_. “I like this one.” 

She scoots over in bed; there was room for him on her other side before, but he knows this is Betty: if she invites herself to spend the night in your bed, the least she’ll do is warm it up for you first. It’s completely unnecessary, but Jughead can’t really say he minds. He leaves the bedside lamp on and settles in next to her, knowing she’ll nudge him into whatever position she wants. Usually she likes to be the little spoon, but tonight she gets him on his back and then tucks herself under one arm, curling against his side and hooking one of her legs over one of his. 

“Sorry,” she says, as her foot—still freezing—hits his calf. 

“Jeez, Cooper, you could’ve left your socks on,” he jokes, but not before he’s sure he’s holding her snugly enough that she won’t try to get up and locate said socks. 

A pink-manicured finger starts tracing the “S” on his t-shirt, and he gently takes her wrist and turns her hand over; this time, he can see her palm, can see the angry red marks those pink nails have left there. 

He lets the hand go without speaking. 

“I know,” she says. He doesn’t think she’s embarrassed anymore, just disappointed in herself, in her lack of self-control. “I just…” 

“You don’t have to explain.” 

“I know,” she says; he can sense something else, something behind the _I know_ , but she doesn’t volunteer whatever it is. 

When she doesn’t relax, either—not even when he starts rubbing her back—he shifts a little so he can see her face better, and asks, “What can I do?”, fully expecting her answer to be _nothing_ , or maybe _stop worrying about me_. 

Instead, she says “Can we stop pretending?” Jughead’s heart skips two full beats, and Betty adds, “Not ‘can we.’ I need to. I need to stop pretending.” 

“You need to stop pretending what?” he says slowly. 

She disentangles herself from him and sits up, pulling her knees into her chest. Jughead sits up too. 

“That it’s ever going to stick. That we’re ever going to…” A shake of her head sends loose blond waves cascading everywhere. She tucks a strand behind her ear and takes a deep breath.

 _Say it_ , Jughead pleads silently; _say it, say it, say it_ , and then _don’t say it, don’t say it, don’t say it_ , because if she says it and he fucks things up yet again, which of course he will— 

“I told you once I never stopped loving you, remember? That I wasn’t sure I could?” 

She pauses, swallows, but doesn’t seem to be waiting for a response—which is a good thing, because there’s no way in hell he could give one right now. 

“It’s been four years, Jug,” she says softly. “I can’t.” 

Jughead is fairly certain he gets out a low “Betts,” but it’s entirely possible that he’s just sitting there in bed while a highlight reel of the last four years unspools before his eyes, last-thing-you-see-before-you-die style. 

“It’s okay if you don’t feel the same,” Betty adds, the tiniest of sobs choking her voice. “I mean, I get it. I just _can’t_ anymore. I can’t keep pretending I don’t love you.” 

And suddenly, improbably, the world makes sense in a way it hadn’t before. In a way that it _should have_ before, if he’d only let himself believe his own senses. 

“Betts,” he says again; this time he’s sure he gets her name out, along with six words that are far more important: “I never stopped loving you either.”

  
  
  
  


He wakes late the next morning with blonde hair everywhere—tickling his nose, tickling his neck, practically in his mouth—and knows at once he’s never been happier. Betty’s on her side, facing away from him, and he finds he can’t resist scooting over enough to make her the little spoon. 

“What time is it?” she yawns. 

“I don’t know.” 

“Mm.” She scoots out from under his arm, throwing an apologetic _I have to use the bathroom_ look over her shoulder as she does so. He watches her pad to the window, where she peeks through the blinds and immediately cringes. 

“What?” 

“Snow,” she says. “A ton of snow.” 

“Like… enough that we can’t get to the store?” 

“Nothing looks plowed, but we can probably walk.” 

“Then we’ll walk,” Jughead says decisively. Betty shoots him a half-amused, half-exasperated look, and he shrugs. “Look, I’m sorry that I wasn’t completely prepared for you to show up at three in the morning and declare your undying love for me. And I think we did pretty well with what we had, but today—” 

Betty rolls her eyes as she drops the blinds and heads to the bathroom. “Literally every other college boy in America just keeps a stash of condoms, Jughead.” 

One day, he’ll ask—maybe—who the hell she imagines he might have needed condoms for, and one day—maybe—he’ll tell her _no one_ , and that will be the truth. For now, though, he just winces at the cold air as he emerges from under the covers, and goes to start a pot of coffee. 

An old gray hat lays crumpled at the back of his sock drawer, waiting. Betty arrived wearing only earmuffs. 

She leaves the next afternoon, with a promise to return the next weekend, and every weekend she can until the weather warms up enough for motorcycles. 

“Keep the hat,” he tells her, giving the pointed brim an affectionate tug. “Looks better on you anyway.”

**Author's Note:**

> As always, comments make my day :)


End file.
